Teaching basic lab skillsfor research computing

A Training Veteran Weighs In

I'm not sure if I qualify as a "instructional training veteran",
but having participated in both the online Software Carpentry (SWC)
instructor training, and two versions of
the Instructional Skills Workshop
(ISW) (on which
the latest
"live" SWC training was modeled) at the University of British
Columbia, I'd like to share a few comments comparing my experience
with both and what I've valued from each. Feel free to add your own
impressions of the SWC or other instructional training in the comments
at the end.

Theory

One of my favorite parts of the SWC training was our use of
education text
How Learning Works.
I remember reading chapters and reminiscing about teaching first-year calculus, saying: "Oh!
That explains why my students struggled! I wish I had known this before!"
How Learning Works addresses practical teaching concerns but also provides
the theory and research behind its claims about how people learn, which had been
missing from my other instructional training. If you haven't read it, do!

Lesson Planning

Any instructional training should include lesson planning. I
appreciated both my ISW and SWC training in this area because they
emphasized different aspects of the process. In the ISW, I learned
about the pieces of a lesson (objectives, pre- and post- testing,
etc.) and got to put them into practice by giving three trial lessons.
With SWC, I finally grasped how you come up with lesson objectives
(hint: write the "exam" first) and how critical they are to lesson
development. For both, I learned (over and over), that it always
takes longer than you think; in a 15-20 minute lesson chunk you can
cover about three ideas max.

Putting Ideas into Practice

It's challenging to create a workshop that impacts people long-term
and instructional training is no exception. Everyone has some sort of
default teaching beliefs/habits, and it can be hard for any short-term
training to introduce new habits and skills. I think the ISW and SWC
training both made a fair stab at this by making the participants
write lessons and do activities based on the principles we were
supposed to be learning, in addition to having dialogue about new and
potentially unfamiliar ideas.

Feedback

By the time you complete an ISW, you want never to hear the word
"feedback" again. Everything has feedback - each session, each
presentation, each day - and sometimes the feedback is multi-faceted -
written, verbal and a group summary. That said, feedback is one of
the most important skills I learned at that workshop, because learning
how to solict quality feedback and then reflect on it is crucial to
teaching well; good feedback drives improvement. This is one place
I'd be keen to see SWC grow, in both instructor training and in
bootcamps themselves.

Training Experience

When I think about my actual experience as a participant, the
difference between SWC instructor training and an ISW is like
comparing apples and oranges: an ISW is in-person, 4 days, and
relatively small (my workshop had two groups of six) while SWC
instructor training is, of necessity, online, intermittent, and begins
with a fairly large cohort. Both had advantages and disadvantages,
which I won't detail here.

Aside from these unavoidable differences, one thing elevates the
ISW experience and makes it unique amongst training workshops I've
attended: the ISW model practices what it preaches. Every segment of
an ISW is planned with care to model the instructional techniques that
you're learning. You can see, in practice, how instructional practice
works even as you're learning about it; you're exposed to a plethora
of instructional techniques; and because this workshop teaches best
practices, you get an incredible learning experience.

Humility

To conclude, my biggest takeaway from both my ISW and SWC training
was the (shocking!) idea that teaching is not about me, or even the
material. Teaching is about the learner. My purpose as an
instructor is not to "say all the things" or even "organize all the
things" (which is my natural tendency) but to genuinely communicate
with people in ways that they will remember and understand. That
means knowing the research, getting trained, getting feedback from
other instructors and frequently doing things that might seem a bit
silly and out of my comfort zone. That's scary and it takes a lot of
work, but ultimately leads to the rewarding moment when a roomful of
learners "gets it" for themselves and are empowered to be better than
they were before. We're all in this learning game together, so in the
wise
words of an eight-year old: "Do not be worried and you will not make
mistakes."